PETALING JAYA: AirAsia has promised that it would honour refund requests, although it has requested for more time do so.
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Air Asia founder Tan Sri Tony Fernandes said that while the situation wasn’t good at the moment, he believed they would slowly get back.
“The reality is AirAsia hasn’t flown in a year. We haven’t had any financial support of any kind like a lot of government airlines,” he said in a video posted on AirAsia’s Facebook page on Thursday (April 1).
He said that since January last year, they had already made 1.5 million refunds.
At the same time, Tony said that 2.9 million people had agreed to get their refunds in the form of credit shells.
“That is the best support anyone could give me and all the All-stars. For that, I will be forever greatful,” he said.
He said there were still 450,000 they had to pay, and that they would do so.
“Every week we are clearing with whatever little cash we have and we will get there for sure,” he said.
“Please give us time, please be patient. I have given you exactly the numbers and so please, appreciate our transparency,” he added.
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He said that before the Covid-19 pandemic, AirAsia was a fantastic airline that flew more than 600 million people.
“Many of you never flew on AirAsia before. We created hundreds of thousands of jobs. Covid-19 is not our fault. We are not bad people. It obviously affected us like many other airlines,” he said.
He said they were still trying to keep as many of their staff, with 10% of them had to be let go.
The others have had to take paycuts.
He said that its long haul airline AirAsia X was in deep financial difficulty because it hasn’t flown anywhere and had to deal with unfair competition.
He said they would go through a corporate restructuring to survive.
He was confident that both airlines would come back stronger.
“Keep the faith. We will get there and we will do our best as soon as possible to get you flying, to get your refunds back,” he said.-The Star